Blizzard said that they listened to our feedback regarding the original Heroes of the Storm “Heroes of the Dorm” broadcasts, and made some changes.

They published a blog post stating that a lot more scenes had been added, but pretty much spent most of the time justifying why it’s not possible to include all this information on an ESPN broadcast. The tl;dr version is that TV screens come in a lot of different shapes and sizes, and they need to simplify the broadcast interface in order to make the viewing experience good for everyone.

If that’s the case, then Blizzard made a mistake broadcasting eSports on national television.

As League of Legends analyst Christopher “MonteCristo” Mykles said, “In some ways it feels like a step back­ward to be on TV.”

In my opinion, there are two very easy ways to fix this.

The first is to have two different live streams, one for television and one for the Internet (through an outlet like YouTube Live or Twitch). The casting would be the same, but the video would be more in-depth and have a more informative overlay for the people who elect to watch online.

The second is to just broadcast the more informative overlay to the television viewers, and just add black bars to the top and bottom for those who still have 4:3 ratio televisions.

Technology, especially technology relating to the Internet, is evolving way too fast to be accommodating for television viewers.

A lot of new games nowadays are released only online through digital download. Game companies aren’t going to burn the game onto a DVD (or a dual-layer DVD for most new games) and ship it to your front door. If you have slow Internet, you’re just gonna have to let it run for a few days. You adapt to the game companies; they don’t adapt to you. The same should be for the Heroes of the Storm broadcast – the viewers adapt to the game companies; the game companies don’t adapt to the viewers.

(Note: Yes, there are some prerequisites for this statement to be effective. The game company should research the viewers and make sure that the highest standard is set for their broadcast. But, after that, the broadcast should not have to adjust and accommodate to every obscure outlier with an old television set.)

(Second note: It’s not like these outliers are being restricted from viewing. They’ll see the broadcast, it’ll just have black bars on the top and bottom, similar to how we see them on YouTube for videos that aren’t 16:9. On the other hand, a lot of gamers who really do care about Heroes of the Storm ARE being restricted from viewing because they don’t have an ESPN subscription.)

Sure, my ranting here isn’t going to change much. But, in my opinion, it’s not something that can just be ignored either. And hopefully, as eSports continues to grow, better solutions can be found to broadcast problems like the ones ESPN is facing right now.